Former Old Dorothy Cinema, Llangollen, Denbighshire
On visits to Llangollen, my gateway to holidays in North Wales, I’ve several times found my way into a legendary second-hand bookshop that I quickly realised had once been a cinema.
Its history is not typical of small-town picture houses.
The Horspool family had been seedsmen and nurserymen in Chirk and Llangollen since the 1870s and opened the Dorothy Café alongside their confectionery shop on Castle Street, Llangollen in 1918. There is no explanation of where the name Dorothy originated.
By the early 1930s the shop next door to the café was Norman Horspool’s greengrocery.
The Dorothy Cinema building utilised the back land behind two shops within a longer terrace. It opened in 1931 or 1932 (whichever source you believe) as a direct competitor to the Town Hall Cinema across the road.
The building consisted of a café and dance hall on the ground floor with an auditorium above, approached by a wide staircase that still exists.
The cinema seated four hundred: there was no balcony as such, but the back rows were raised, stadium style, facing a sixteen-foot proscenium.
British Acoustic sound was installed at the outset.
The Town Hall cinema across the road closed at the beginning of World War II, and the Dorothy became Llangollen’s only picture house.
As such, it seemed to weather the early decline of cinema attendance in the 1950s, and in 1955 the proscenium was extended to accommodate a wide screen twenty feet by eleven feet.
By the early 1960s, however, the game was up and the last film, Sammy Going South, was shown on October 16th 1963.
An experiment with bingo failed, and while the café and dance hall downstairs continued, the former cinema became a market and then an inimitable second-hand bookshop, Maxine’s Cafe & Books, now trading as Books Llangollen.
The place is piled high with 100,000+ volumes on every subject imaginable, stacked on the steps of the back rows, and clustered round the decorative proscenium frame.
On July 15th 2015 films returned to the Town Hall under a brand-name that pays tribute to the former competitor – the New Dot Cinema.
Former Highfield Cocoa & Coffee House, London Road, Sheffield
Some significant historic buildings hide in plain sight, unnoticed and at risk of disappearing without much warning.
It’s a recurring theme in my Demolished Sheffield book that a great many attractive and noteworthy structures are off the radar of listing and conservation planning policies, and need the vigilance of local people to ensure they survive.
I’m grateful, therefore, to Robin Hughes for alerting me to the former Highfield Cocoa and Coffee House on London Road, which is subject to a planning application for its demolition and replacement by an incongruous five-storey structure that intrudes on the surrounding streetscape.
I must have driven past the building thousands of times without even noticing it. It’s attractive, dignified but reticent, and its historical significance is invisible.
It was built in 1877 to the designs of one of Sheffield’s foremost architectural practices, M E Hadfield & Son, for one of its most generous philanthropists, Frederick Thorpe Mappin (1821-1910), to provide workmen with a safe, comfortable environment to eat, drink and relax before and after their work.
The cocoa houses were in essence pubs with no alcohol, based on the upper-class gentlemen’s clubs that had grown from the coffee houses of the eighteenth century.
The Highfield Cocoa and Coffee House provided food starting with hot breakfasts from 5.00am, non-intoxicating drinks including a pint mug of coffee for one old penny, “the best tobacco and cigars…at the cheapest rate”, and offered billiards, draughts, dominoes, chess and skittles. Alcohol and gambling were alike strictly prohibited.
The ground floor was occupied by a coffee room, a reading room, a bar and a kitchen. Above, accessible by a “spacious staircase”, was a second reading room “well supplied with papers”, linking by folding doors to the billiard room with three tables.
The Highfield Cocoa House was the first such establishment in Sheffield when it opened on Monday April 9th 1877 in the presence of almost all the major leaders of Sheffield’s public life, including both Sheffield MPs, John Arthur Roebuck (1802-1879) and A J Mundella (1825-1897), and the MP for Scarborough, Sir Harcourt Johnstone (1829-1916), the Mayor of Sheffield, George Bassett (1818-1886), the Master Cutler, Edward Tozer (c1820-1890), and a whole posse of aldermen, clergy and other gentlemen.
Mr Roebuck in his speech remarked that “you will not put down intemperance by being intemperate in trying to force upon the people teetotalism”.
Frederick Thorpe Mappin, before he declared the building open, explained how he and the vicar of St Mary’s Parish Church, Bramall Lane, Rev C E Lamb, had investigated the flourishing cocoa-house movement in Liverpool, Oldham and London to determine the most appropriate model for their scheme.
Within two years the Sheffield Cocoa and Coffee House Company had opened six more cocoa houses with a seventh under construction.
The initial popularity of the Highfield house waned, and it closed on Saturday June 27th 1908. An illustrated cutting, apparently from the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, remarked,–
“At the outset the place was a very popular centre – cafés in those days were in the nature of a rarity – but for a long time past the place has worn a somewhat melancholy appearance…“
The building was taken over by a confectioner and a shopfitter and remained in use until at least 2008. The Tramway pub next door was demolished in 2015.
The Hallamshire Historic Buildings’ detailed, informative comment on the 2022-23 planning application to demolish the Cocoa House is here. Nick Roscoe’s illustrated article is here.
The Blackpool Tramway is a monument to the entire history of railed street transport in Britain.
Blackpool had the very first electric street tramway in Britain, opened in 1885, and it now runs a modern light rapid-transit (LRT) service, alongside a varied collection of heritage trams for tourists and enthusiasts.
Until after the First World War three tram operators between Fleetwood and Lytham St Annes each ran two fleets – entirely conventional trams for local traffic alongside a range of designs to cater for crowds of holidaymakers who wanted to ride around enjoying themselves, preferably in the open air when the weather was favourable.
In the 1930s when a new transport manager, Walter Luff, was appointed he quickly realised that it would be impossible to handle the Promenade crowds with buses, particularly in the autumn Illuminations period.
He commissioned a suite of four ultra-modern tram designs primarily to work the Promenade service – luxurious, streamlined single- and double-deckers, some of them open to the fresh air for summer services.
After the Second World War, while every other tram operator in the country went over to electric trolleybuses or diesel motor buses Blackpool still needed the segregated Promenade tracks, stretching from Starr Gate in the south to the outskirts of Fleetwood in the north, to shift the crowds up and down the Promenade efficiently with the best possible view of the Illuminations.
New trams were far more expensive than new buses, however, so the 1930s fleet soldiered on, patched, repaired and many of them rebuilt in new guises.
The only completely new trams to be added to the fleet after the 1950s were eight Centenary cars, built around the time of the tramway’s hundredth anniversary in 1985, when Government subsidies became available for new trams as well as buses.
Eventually the game was up, and the Victorian tramway was upgraded to modern LRT standards, with a fleet of sixteen sleek articulated trams which took over the basic service in 2012.
Nowadays, the Blackpool Tramway has three fleets: the LRT cars are the “A” fleet, nine modified 1934-35 double-deck Balloon cars are the “B” fleet with widened doorways so they can stop at the raised LRT platforms, and the “C” fleet is a huge and varied collection of rolling stock dating back to, and before, the 1930s modernisation. Some of these trams are operational; others await repair or restoration.
The “C” fleet’s traditional home, Rigby Road depot, had an uncertain future in the period when the LRT fleet was planned and installed. The new fleet eventually went to a purpose-built depot at Starr Gate, and Rigby Road was designated the base for the heritage fleet, despite a long-standing backlog of building maintenance.
It’s now intended to double as a working tram depot and a museum, branded as Tramtown. The building needs attention to make it weatherproof, and some at least of the relics on wheels that have fetched up there need to move elsewhere to increase display space.
One of the most enjoyable residential leisure-learning weekends I’ve ever had the pleasure to lead was ‘Dream Palaces: an introduction to cinema architecture’ in November 2004 for the now-closed and much-lamented Wedgwood Memorial College at Barlaston, near Stoke-on-Trent.
The College was blessed with a cosy atmosphere, an eclectic selection of subjects for study, staff who alike knew the regular students and welcomed newcomers, and home cooking.
The centrepiece of my two-day programme of talks, videos and slide presentations was a half-day trip to visit the Plaza Cinema, Stockport, a magnificent example of an early-Thirties super-cinema, designed by William Thornley and a near twin of his Regal, Altrincham, which opened in 1931 and burnt down in 1956.
The Plaza is unusual in that it’s built into a cliff, its façade facing Mersey Square, once the gathering place for the town’s trams and buses. Much of the 1,800-seat auditorium is practically underground. In an evacuation, some members of the audience go upstairs to the emergency exits rather than down.
The interior displays an eclectic mixture of Egyptian, classical, Moorish and Art Deco features of unusual richness: the original decorative scheme was dominated by the burnished silver dome, lit by a Holophane system of 6,000 variable coloured lights.
The three-manual, eleven-rank Compton organ, like its sister at the Regal, Altrincham, was built to the specification of Norman Cocker, deputy organist at Manchester Cathedral, and was the very first Compton organ to have an illuminated console.
The Plaza opened in on Friday October 6th 1932, showing Laurel and Hardy in Jailbirds and Jessie Matthews in Out of the Blue. Its prominent central site protected it from increased competition in its early years and from the inexorable decline of cinema audiences in the 1950s, even though its nearest large competitors belonged to national first-release circuits.
It was bought by the Mecca Group in 1965, and after initial opposition from Stockport Borough Council a replacement bingo club opened on February 6th 1967. The stage machinery was removed in 1989 to increase the bingo playing-area, and for a time the café operated as a night-club. Because the building was used as a bingo club until 1998 the auditorium was never subdivided, and its intact interior was in sufficiently good condition to merit Grade II listing.
Even before the closure of the bingo operation, an active campaign for preservation led to the founding of the Friends of the Plaza, an energetic group of volunteers supporting the Stockport Plaza Trust, whose campaign, in turn backed by Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, English Heritage and the National Trust, has provided the town with a venue for live performances, recitals and films.
The Trust took possession in March 2000. Six months later the listing was upgraded to II*, and on October 7th 2000 the building returned to public use.
In 2009, the Plaza closed for a comprehensive £3,200,000 refurbishment, and reopened on 11th December the same year with a cine/variety show, similar to its original 1932 opening show, featuring Gold Diggers of 1933, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in Towed in a Hole, soprano Marilyn Hill-Smith leading a tribute to Gracie Fields with the Plaza Orchestra, and Richard Hills playing the Compton organ.
When my Wedgwood Memorial College group visited a month before Christmas 2004, after a behind-the-scenes tour we joined an audience for Holiday Inn, the film for which Irving Berlin wrote ‘White Christmas’, together with a period newsreel, Pearl & Dean advertisements, the Compton organ, the lady with the ice-cream tray and, at the very end, we all stood up for The Queen.
There could hardly a better prelude to Christmas – all in the cause of adult continuing education.
Wakefield Regal/ABC/Cannon Cinema, West Yorkshire (June 2021)
Though Wakefield can be justifiably proud of the preservation and continued flourishing of the Theatre Royal, its best surviving cinema building has come to a sticky end.
The RegalCinema at the junction of Kirkgate and Sun Lane was opened on December 9th 1935 by the Associated British Picture Corporation.
It was designed by ABC’s house architect, William R Glen, in the instantly recognisable modern style that most people know as Art Deco. To the left of the corner entrance, the walls swept in a graceful curve following the alignment of Sun Lane.
The interior had the characteristics of thirties design – bold curves, concealed lighting and a 43-foot wide proscenium framing what in those days was a standard Academy-ratio screen.
In fact, though it only seated 1,594 at the outset – mid-range in comparison with other contemporary urban cinemas – the stage was 26 feet deep, providing space for major drama or dance productions.
Its later history was similar to many other town cinemas – rebranded as ABC in 1962, tripled by inserting two small screens in the stalls under the balcony in 1976, sold to the Cannon group in 1986. It closed in 1997, shortly after a major Cineworld multiplex opened in the town.
A covenant requiring the building to remain in cinema use inhibited any possibility of adaptive re-use.
The building rotted while proposals to convert it into flats in 2007 or to demolish it to make way for a new apartment building in 2013 came to nothing.
Eventually Wakefield Borough Council bought it in 2020, in desperation that a fine building which had become an eyesore would before long become a hazard.
A rearguard action by an energetic Friends group, supported by the Cinema Theatre Association, tried unsuccessfully to convince the Council there was any future for the building or its façade, but a “non-obtrusive structural survey” concluded that demolition would be safer before it began to fall down.
In June 2021 the Council resolved to flatten it to create a temporary “green space” until a replacement structure, designed to “celebrate” Glen’s 1930s design, could be built.
Wakefield Theatre Royal & Opera House, West Yorkshire
Ken Dodd used to say that you could immediately tell a Frank Matcham theatre simply by walking on to the stage and speaking quietly. You’d be audible at the back of the gallery without difficulty.
Frank Matcham’s smallest surviving theatre is the Wakefield Theatre Royal & Opera House, for many years known as the Opera House and now as the Theatre Royal.
It stands on the site of an earlier Theatre Royal, which had been built in 1776 for the actor-manager Tate Wilkinson (1739-1803).
Under his management John Kemble performed in Wakefield in 1778 and 1788 and Sarah Siddons in 1786; in the following generation Charles Kemble acted at the Theatre Royal in 1807 and Edmund Kean in 1819.
The old theatre went into gradual decline through the middle of the nineteenth century, and in 1871 became a beer house and music hall, licensed by John Brooke, the landlord of the Black Horse pub.
In 1883 it was revived as the Royal Opera House by Benjamin Sherwood, but was denied a licence nine years later because of the condition of the building.
The replacement theatre was built in 1894 in nine months flat at a cost of £13,000 to Matcham’s designs and opened on October 15th that year.
After the failure of Benjamin Sherwood’s marriage in 1900 his wife Fanny and their children took over the theatre as Sherwood & Co.
In the early 1950s their family sold it for £20,000 to Solomon Sheckman, owner of the Essoldo chain of cinemas. He installed a wide screen for Cinemascope in 1954 and operated it solely as a cinema until he leased it as a bingo hall in 1966.
It passed to Ladbrokes and was listed Grade II in 1979.
When Ladbrokes announced its closure in 1980 the Wakefield Theatre Trust, led by Rodney (latterly Sir Rodney) Walker, began a campaign to bring live theatre back to the town.
The restoration involved –
renewing the stage house
strengthening the grid and installing a new counterweight system for flying
re-raking the stalls and lower circle floors
reinstating the front-of-house canopy
removing the projection box
The building is Grade II* listed, largely on the strength of the quality of the auditorium decoration by De Jong of London – bombé balcony fronts, foliage, fruit and flowers on the lower balcony and paired dolphins in waves on the upper circle. The original colour-scheme was gold and blue. The proscenium is intact, and the ceiling has eight decorative medallions of the Muses, reinstated by Kate Lyons, who placed the ninth muse in the central panel of the dress circle front.
It reopened with a gala show on March 16th 1986. Arthur Starkie, who co-ordinated the theatre’s centenary celebrations, founded the Frank Matcham Society at the Theatre Royal in 1994.
The Trust acquired the adjacent street-corner site to create a new entrance and bar. Further grants in 1995, 2002 and 2012 enabled improvements to the auditorium.
The theatre has gained prestige from the appointment as creative director of the playwright John Godber in 2011. He was born locally, at Upton, and taught drama at the nearby Bretton Hall College. His breakthrough play, Bouncers (1977) has become a perennial favourite, and his John Godber Company is resident at the Theatre Royal.
I first saw Bouncers at the Wakefield Theatre Royal. The play is performed by four male actors in black tie, who play the bouncers, the stroppy youths who have to be chucked out and the girls dancing round their handbags. John Godber portrays the bitter-sweet lives of the men who spend their Saturday nights dealing with the clients who create so much noise, aggression and vomit.
At the end of the night, walking out of the theatre on to Westgate was like stepping into the play.
Former Odeon Cinema, Flat Street, Sheffield (1993)
It pleases me to have books on my bookshelf that were written by people I know.
I met Sam Manning at the 2015 Picture House Revival weekend that Hand Of created to relaunch the Abbeydale Picture Palace as a cinema after it had been closed for forty years.
Sam was at the time doing postgraduate research into cinema-going in Sheffield and Belfast between 1945 and 1965, and asked me to contribute an oral-history interview to his PhD thesis.
I’ve never been to Belfast, so that aspect of his writing was new territory for me, but the Sheffield sections relate to my childhood memories and my more recent local-history research.
Sam writes as part of the “new cinema history” movement [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137337016_7], which seeks to place the contemporary experience of going to the pictures in the wider context of social history in the first sixty-five years of the twentieth century.
This extends the ubiquitous nostalgia accounts of the generation that knew or worked in cinemas until the 1960s and the analyses of cinema architecture, the business history of the industry and the endless literature of films and film-makers that have appeared in recent decades.
On the local level, I learned a great deal because Sam has done the legwork of surveying the surviving archives of individual cinemas against city-wide data from local newspapers, government and industry records and oral-history evidence.
He revises the long-held view that suburban cinema-going was killed by the advent of television. There were other significant factors in play – increasing affluence, flight from inner-city slums to new housing estates and the rise of a generation of young people who thought they’d invented “teenage”, the generation commemorated in Cliff Richard’s hit ‘The Young Ones’ (1962).
He also explains a counterintuitive feature of Sheffield’s post-war cinema history, the building on Flat Street of one of the few post-war Odeon cinemas, later followed by a luxurious ABC on Angel Street.
In the 1930s, when three major chains – Odeon, Gaumont and ABC – dominated the national industry, Sheffield’s cinemas were largely owned by local companies. Gaumont British Theatres took over the Regent in 1929, two years after it opened, and in 1931 ABC leased the Hippodrome, a variety theatre dating back to 1907, which they gave up in 1948. Neither invested in the sort of super-cinema that is the villain of the piece in the film The Smallest Show on Earth (1957).
The Odeon chain leased a site at the junction of Flat Street and Norfolk Street in 1933, and after a five-year delay the architects Harry Weedon and W Calder Robson designed a 2,326-seat cinema, four shops and a three-storey office block. Construction began in March 1939 and quickly came to a halt at the outbreak of the Second World War.
The post-war alignment of Sheffield’s proposed civic circle road, later known as Arundel Gate, meant redesigning the Odeon on a smaller footprint.
When building restrictions were removed in 1954 the pre-war steelwork was dismantled and the new cinema, without the intended shops and offices, was built to a completely fresh design by Harry Weedon and Robert Bullivant.
This design featured a 55-foot screen and seated 2,319 – 1,505 in the stalls and 814 in the balcony. Lighting in the auditorium was by three rows of fittings hanging close to the ceiling and from concealed lights in the two decorative panels each side of the proscenium. Sheffield had seen nothing like it before.
The new Odeon opened on July 16th 1956 with the newly-released Kenneth More feature-film Reach for the Sky, attended by the Deputy Lord Mayor, Ald Joseph Curtis, the managing director of the Rank Organisation, John Davis, and his wife, film star Dinah Sheridan, accompanied by the Dagenham Girl Pipers, state trumpeters from the York & Lancaster Regiment and a contingent of service personnel from RAF Norton.
In November 1958 the Odeon was equipped to show Todd-AO wide-screen films with stereophonic sound so that it could specialise in long runs of blockbuster movies.
By the mid-1960s, cinema-going habits had changed radically. The Sound of Music on first release ran from October 3rd 1965 until February 1967. It was immediately followed by Khartoum (1966).
For a short period of slightly less than two years, there were four high-quality 70mm screens in the city. The new ABC had a 60ft screen from its opening on May 18th 1961. The 70ft screen at the Gaumont was first used on July 23rd 1969 and the smaller screen at Gaumont 2 followed in October of the same year.
The Odeon closed on June 5th 1971 at the end of a further fourteen-month run of The Sound of Music and reopened in September of the same year as a Top Rank bingo hall, later rebranded as Mecca.
The Gaumont closed on November 7th 1985, followed by the ABC on July 28th 1988. Both buildings were demolished.
Over years of driving into
East Anglia I have only associated Felixstowe
with processions of container trucks hammering down the A14.
When I stayed at the Woodbridge Station Guest House I took the train to Ipswich and then on to Felixstowe to a happy surprise. “Felix” is, after all, Latin for “happy”.
The mouth of the River
Orwell has been strategically important, both for trade and defence, since
Roman times at least, and grew markedly after the arrival of the railway in
1877 and the opening of the port in 1886.
The passenger train-service now terminates at the latest of the town’s three stations, Felixstowe Town (1898), which was built in response to an upturn in tourism after the 1891 visit of Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein (1858-1921), Queen Victoria’s great-niece and the wife of Germany’s last Kaiser, Wilhelm II.
The walk down Hamilton
Road, now partly pedestrianised, leads to a clifftop view of the Pier (1905; rebuilt 2017) [http://www.felixstowe-pier.co.uk], with the cranes of the distant docks to the right, and the promenade to the left.
The seafront is dotted with
opulent former hotels, of which the Felix
Hotel (1903) is the most prominent.
This is where Princess Victoria and her family stayed in 1901 and,
coincidentally, where Wallis Simpson took rooms while her divorce took place in
nearby Ipswich in 1936. (This was the
occasion of the legendary American newspaper headline “KING’S MOLL RENO’D IN
WOLSEY’S HOME TOWN.”) The Felix closed
in 1952 and became the headquarters of the fertiliser company Fisons Ltd for
thirty years. It is now, predictably,
converted to apartments.
Landguard Fort
[http://www.landguard.com] introduces visitors to the long history of
Felixstowe’s defences. This was the
location of the last opposed invasion of England in 1677, and four of the
original seven Martello towers in the town survive.
I had a typical seaside
lunch, fish and chips at Fish Dish [http://www.myfishdish.co.uk]. When I told the guy behind the till that the
place reminded me of Whitby he smiled and said he’d trained and worked at
Whitby for thirteen years before setting up in Essex.
The pleasures of Felixstowe
are simple. On a sunny day you can sit
on a promenade bench and watch vast container ships, loaded to capacity, making
their way out of the port at surprising speed.
And, because Ipswich is a
significant rail hub, you can visit Felixstowe from far afield without using a
car.
This is an intriguing place, a medieval hill-top castle
documented from 1256 and for centuries owned by the Ricasoli-Firidolfi family,
who sold up only in 1968. The interiors,
on the ground floor at least, are entirely baroque, with an unrestored patina
of faded splendour.
We were treated to a cookery demonstration by the chef,
Elena, who spoke only Italian, translated (or perhaps explicated) by the
hostess Geraldine, who extolled the quality of the Castle’s extra virgin olive
oil, which we were invited to smell and taste.
We were shown how to make an Italian stew, which seemed to me exactly how I would make an English stew with Italian ingredients.
The pasta-making demonstration was more entertaining, and a
great deal of pasta was passed hand to hand around the group.
We were invited out for antipasti
on the terrace, where a classical wing of the house (with a medieval turret on
the end) faces a flat lawn and a wall, from where expanses of hillside
vineyards are visible.
No sooner had we wandered outside than a misty rain began to
fall, and within ten minutes the waitresses shifted the antipasti back into the castle and a loud clap of thunder heralded
a downpour that lasted no more than half an hour.
We tucked into the antipasti
indoors while Geraldine gave lectures first on the Castle’s white wine and then
on the rosé, all the time pouring wine into everyone’s glasses and interrupting
her flow with “I’ll fetch another bottle.”
There was no sniffing or spitting.
This was a straightforward invitation to get trollied.
We weren’t formally shown the downstairs rooms, but instead
trotted off to the cellars which are tricked out with barrels and racks of
bottles.
Geraldine took us from the cellars to a surprise – a tiny,
intact private theatre, dated 1741, complete with perspective scenery and a
balcony. I can find nothing of any
significance about it online, and I’ve never come across it in the
theatre-history literature.
Indeed, I wonder if its provenance and history have been
seriously researched. It is at any rate
a great rarity.
A three-course dinner followed, liberally lubricated with
red chianti and a dessert wine. I sat
back from the conversation and watched the sunset through the trees outside the
window.
Then predictably, “pat,…like the catastrophe in the old
comedy”, came the buying opportunity. My
fellow guests queued up to buy bottles of wine and olive oil, while I sat in an
armchair and watched.
Eventually we began the journey back, of which the first seventy minutes were simply a succession of hairpin bends and a few small villages. We joined the motorway south of Florence, and it took another three-quarters of an hour to reach our hotel in Montecatini Terme.
I reflected on the considerable appeal of the Castillo di Meleto. It’s now owned by a joint-stock company and you can stay there, at rates which are high but not outrageous. However, it’s so remote that it would be impractical to go anywhere: it’s simply a place to enjoy, with extensive gardens, an infinity pool and a restaurant down the drive for lunch and dinner: https://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=http://www.castellomeleto.it/&prev=search.
The launch took place in the fly tower of the Abbeydale Picture House, and Darren
asked me to explain to his guests the history of this unique piece of cinema
heritage.
The Grade II listed Abbeydale Picture House was always a gem
among Sheffield’s suburban cinemas, and thanks to a succession of sympathetic
owners it’s survived to entertain new generations of patrons nearly a hundred
years after its opening.
One of six Sheffield cinemas to open in 1920, its original
proprietors were local businessmen, led by a professional cinema exhibitor,
seeking to capitalise on the demand for entertainment after the First World
War.
They hedged their bets by instructing the architect, Pascal J Steinlet, to build a full-scale theatre fly tower, enabling the cinema screen to be flown out of the way of stage performances, and to use the sloping site to include a ballroom and billiard hall beneath the auditorium and stage, with a café to serve cinema patrons on the first floor above the foyer.
The directors considered that moving pictures alone might
not generate enough trade, and when post-war inflation ate into their original
budget of £50,000 they changed plans and installed an organ by the Sheffield
firm Brindley & Co.
Because Pascal Steinlet had not been briefed to include an
organ chamber, the instrument stood immediately behind the screen, centre
stage, making it impossible to use the stage and dressing rooms for
performances.
Anxious to generate income, they opened the cinema as soon
as they could, on December 20th 1920.
The Lord Mayor, Alderman Wardley, attended the first film-performance, a
costume romance, The Call of the Road,
starring Victor McLaglen.
Their fear that film alone would not support the company
proved correct. In June 1921 the
original board was replaced by the directors of the Star Cinema, Ecclesall
Road, who quickly took out debentures to complete the café, ballroom and
billiard hall before the end of the year.
In 1928, probably as a response to the imminent arrival of talking
pictures, the organ was moved to the back of the stage, where it was barely
audible, to make way for cine-variety performances, which continued until the
first sound film, Janet Gaynor in Sunny
Side Up, played on March 10th 1930.
The organ continued in use until 1940, and the last
organist, Douglas Scott, complained that “the volume was poor, due to the fact
that the organ chambers were placed as far back as possible on the stage and…at
least 20% of the sound went through the stage roof. The screen and tabs took their toll of sound
and when the safety curtain was lowered nothing could be heard in the theatre.”
There’s evidence for this on the back wall of the fly tower, where two rows of holes for the joists of the stage floor are visible, the higher row showing a clear gap where after 1928 the organ would have stood on the original stage floor. The position of the organ meant that only the downstage half of the stage was usable, so presumably the rake was altered to maintain the sight-lines Pascal Steinlet had intended.
I hope that when the building is comprehensively restored
the stage floor will be reinstated so that it can be used for performances.
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